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Monday, March 30, 2015

It used to jar me, those many years ago when I was new to
Puerto Rico, and when the unbelievable and the amazing dropped into my life as
nonchalantly as my cat might plop into my lap. Then I realized that the
Classical idea of different gods ruling different places was true, and the Gods
of Puerto Rico tend to be exuberant and wickedly funny.

So I no longer know how I came upon Sara Davis Buechner, though I suspect
it was through surfing YouTube, and coming across a clip of “That’s Pathetic,” in
which Dr. Sara Davis Buechner traces stile
patetico from Beethoven to Mozart. Well, it was obvious: Buechner was one
hell of a pianist, but who was she, and why had I not heard of her before?

Melancholy news, Dear Readers: The world is full of
extraordinary musicians, and very few of them have climbed sufficiently high to
have claimed your attention. But I was curious, and then spent a happy hour
listening to a talk Buechner had given about piano pedagogy—not a
topic that I, as a cellist, knew anything about, but still fascinating. And it
was chilling to learn, as I did in the first five minutes, that even as a
professor at the Manhattan School of Music—certainly one of our finest music
schools—Buechner was encountering student who couldn’t play a four-octave
scale.

All right, I still can’t wrap my head around it, but then I
remembered: Thirty years ago, at a University of Wisconsin-Madison event, I met
music majors (and I believe they were pianists) who couldn’t identify The Ride of the Valkyries.
So, reluctantly, I’m forced to believe that there are piano students out there,
about to graduate, about to become teachers of piano themselves, who cannot
play scales. Unbelievable.

Then the coincidences began piling up. I clicked on a New
York Times clip (see below) and learned that Buechner had always been Buechner,
but had not always been Sara. OK, as a gay man, my encountering a transgendered
person is no big deal, but don’t think that it wasn’t a big deal in Buechner’s
life. Like so many of us, it took her years to make the decision. After having
been a child prodigy, studied on full scholarship Julliard, won many important
piano competitions, and played with the most important orchestras in the States
and abroad, she faced what I suspect was her most daunting challenge. She went
to Thailand and got a sex change operation.

It was a disaster.

Medically, since the “doctor” botched the operation.
Professionally, because she went from playing fifty concerts a year to playing
almost none. She cycled into depression and hit the booze, and finally, nearly
homeless, had to start teaching schoolchildren, since over two hundred
universities and conservatories had turned her down. How good was she, this
woman? Here’s The Washington
Post:

Buechner is the pianist, but the score is the star...This artist becomes
the picture of self-effacing restraint, putting thoughtful artistry in the full
service of the music.....unceasing drive and intelligence.

Buechner got back
on her feet and moved to Canada, where she found greater acceptance, and a
job—at last—with the University of British Columbia. A former Juilliard
classmate—married, and mother of four—offered to become her agent, and what did
she have to lose? Today, Buechner is married to a Japanese woman, and has
resumed playing professionally, though not yet with the likes of the New York
Philharmonic, et al.

So then it was time
to check out Buechner’s website, because in the clip from The New York Times,
completely reinforced by the music on her homepage, I was hearing a pianist I
had heard many, many times before, and thought I would never hear again.

I was hearing
Gunnar Johansen.

When you put the
right music with the right musician in the right setting—well, the word “magic”
is poor stuff indeed. Johansen had been a grand-student of Liszt, and a student
of Egon Petri, and he had a technique that few people else had. And that, I
privately thought, was almost a shame, since he tended to play this fiendishly
difficult music: Busoni, Friedmann,
Liszt. But the magic for me came when he played something as transparently
simple as the third movement of the Chopin Piano and Cello Sonata.

It fascinated me,
those many months that we prepared it together, since even I could play the
notes on the piano. The problem? The piano and the cello are embraced in a
rapturous interchange: Think Heloise and Abalard, Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and
Isolde. When we finally performed the piece, I had learned more about phrasing
and the exquisite placement of notes that made pianists of an earlier age so
extraordinary.

I now think that it
was the greater sum of many parts. There was this amazing sense that the music
was surging—a deep ocean swell—but never that it was forced. In addition,
Johansen varied ever so slightly the tempo within the bar and within a phrase,
so that yes, the rhythm was there, but it was never utterly metronomic. (We
once, for some reason, played with a metronome, and I was utterly astonished
that Johansen got off with the metronome, sailed through the entire piece, and
then roared, “WONDERFUL!”) As well, he had what used to be called a “delicate”
touch, and much of that—I suspect—had to do with the release of a note, as much
as the start of a note.

This is technical,
and may not be true—I was and am a cellist. Nor does it matter to anyone but
pianists, since if you were there, sitting at candlelight after one of
Lorraine’s superb dinners (she was in the kitchen what he was in the studio),
and someone summoned the courage to ask Gunnar to play, well, what did you
hear?

It was smooth, it
was creamy, it was the most polished and beautiful playing that I had heard a
pianist make. And it was paradoxically the most utterly civilized and the most
completely wild sound imaginable.

I say “wild” since
there isn’t, I think, a word for something like the sound of Canada Geese
flying overhead on a chilling, damp autumn night. Timeless. Completely
connected to nature, almost nature itself.

And so I read her
biography, and with whom did she study, among many others?

Right….

On to her blog,
since I now was smitten, and electronic stalking is the fate of all bloggers.
So then it was time to read about Paul Badura-Skoda: A familiar name, since he
had been at Wisconsin and had been a great friend of the Johansens. And
Buechner had had the same sensation on hearing Badura-Skoda as I had had
hearing Johansen. Here’s what
she wrote:

But one thing manifested itself from the opening note of the Chopin
Waltz in A minor op. 34 no. 2 — the rich cantabile tone of a master’s
touch, a sound one simply does not hear very often from pianists these days.

Did I tell you that
the “coincidences” were piling up? Because when I checked her schedule, I found
that her next performance was the next day in…

…San Juan, Puerto
Rico.

What to do? Our son
was coming to dinner that night, and Mr. Fernández had a turkey to cook for the
next day, since it was and it wasn’t Mamina’s
birthday, but that wasn’t the point. She had decreed that it was, and had also
decreed the turkey, and when any Puerto Rican mother decrees—and especially
Mamina—well, you listen!

But Gunnar was
stirring about, as the dead do occasionally, and telling me: Send Buechner an
email and tell her you have a gift from Gunnar Johansen. Then take her a pound
of coffee—why bring flowers when she’ll likely be flying out the next day?—and
a copy of my book, Life, Death and Iguanas, since Gunnar plays a part in it.

But I stayed home,
and now, of course, wish I hadn’t. I might have met an extraordinary musician,
but that was hardly the point….

Life, Death and Iguanas

Life, Death…and Iguanas?Yes, that’s the title of an e-book available on Amazon / Kindle. It’s the story of a woman who took charge of her death, just as she had her life. Of a family that split, and then united. Of a man who decided to live. Oh, and there’s some great stuff about iguanas….Read the first chapter by clicking here!